Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...THIS LYRIC passage was penned in 1928 by W.E.B. DuBois as an ode to his ancestral home and to a small, typically New England town of Great Barrington. At the time of his death the great intellectual probably would not have been welcome in Great Barrington, for he had renounced his American citizenship, joined the Communist Party, and gone off to Africa. Yer, although DuBois turned away from the United States in disgust, he never spoke of his birthplace without a warm vibrancy in his voice and a soft look in his eyes. Last Saturday William Edward Barghardt DuBois, scholar...
...vivacity, energy and flair for exuberant gesture and radiant color, American art in the 1940s was already betraying a moody melancholy lurking beneath the aggressive romanticism. Ar shile Gorky's disembodied forms, drifting poignantly amid the lyric whisperings of nature, have a kind of indescribable horror, like cancer in a beautiful girl. Edward Hopper's Gas is everybody's home town - and it is stifling with loneliness...
Such work stands peer to Frost, Sandburg and other white American poets who are constantly recited in our schools. In fact, the black tenth of the nation has produced at least a dozen lyric voices of the most intense quality: Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Fenton Johnson and Frank Home. Here, selected lines are ranged against the pictures, both as commentary and gloss...
...does not. The straight middle-class American breadwinner, secure and affluent beyond the dreams of his grandparents or most of his contemporaries elsewhere in the world, Mr. Jones of Dylan's mocking lyric, finds himself in a world more surreal than a moonscape. He looks behind, and realizes that his children are not following. At a frightening distance, in their own arcane pastures of the mind, the young strip and ululate and make love to the accompaniment of manic cacophonies. Even in the Joneses' own backyard, thrusting up between the roses and the hollyhocks, a sharp eye may spot...
...less nasal and rasping than before, far less a mixture of drone and downward slur. The tone is softer, rounder; one note leads gracefully to the next, and the result is just as satisfying in its own way. Unexpectedly bending and holding notes like a crooner, Dylan gave a lyric, wistful quality to the traditional Irish ballad, Wild Mountain Thyme. He introduced no new songs, but older ones like It Ain't Me Babe, once intoned in harsh, jagged phrases, took on new colors and a smoother flow...